DES MOINES, Iowa—Days before a key deadline for establishing legislative priorities, the Iowa Senate passed a bill that would make it impossible to bring “Failure to Warn” lawsuits against pesticide companies for cancer and other health issues caused by their products.
It’s the second year in a row that the Senate has advanced a bill granting legal protections to pesticide companies and the second time that the House has declined to take up the bill.
Senate Bill 394 squeaked through the majority Republican Senate in a divisive 26-21 vote at the end of March. However, Iowa’s “second funnel” deadline required that bills pass debate in one chamber and be taken up by a committee in the other chamber by Friday, April 4, in order to remain eligible for consideration. The day before this deadline, House Speaker Pat Grassley held a press conference and said, “At this point in time, there’s not support within the caucus for that bill.”
Introduced on behalf of the Modern Ag Alliance, an agrochemical lobbying group founded in 2024 by the agrochemical giant Bayer, the bill would have prevented lawsuits against pesticide companies on grounds that a product’s label did not adequately warn of health and safety risks, so long as the label was consistent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s assessment of its active ingredients.
Though the bill would apply to all pesticide manufacturers, debate has centered on Roundup, the popular herbicide originally produced by Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018. Roundup is the most widely-used glyphosate pesticide in the U.S. But each year, Bayer spends billions of dollars on legal claims linking the weedkiller to cancer.
Bayer maintains that the product is safe, pointing to repeated EPA evaluations of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate. In both 2015 and 2017, the EPA classified glyphosate as “not Likely to be Carcinogenic to Humans.”
However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified glyphosate as a Group 2A substance, “probably carcinogenic to humans.” In 2020 alone, Bayer paid more than $10 billion dollars to settle 180,000 claims that exposure to Roundup had caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
A 2022 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit required the EPA to revisit and update its evaluation of glyphosate’s impact on human and ecological health. The EPA says this review is ongoing.
Supporters of Iowa Senate Bill 394 argue that costly lawsuits over glyphosate will cause agrochemical companies to stop selling pesticides. In a massive ad campaign, the Modern Ag Alliance has urged Iowans to “Control Weeds, Not Farming.”
Putting additional warnings on glyphosate products labels—warnings not seconded by the EPA—would expose companies to further legal trouble, proponents of the bill argue.
“It is not fantastical to see that if you are faced with the terrible rock and a hard place choice of either following the law [and getting sued] or breaking the law, you’re just going to choose to get out of the game,” said Mike Bousselot, a Republican senator from Iowa’s 21st district and chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee, which released the bill for debate.
Opponents of the bill say this is a false choice.
“They were implying that there was going to be an effort to take away Roundup or glyphosate products, and there’s no indication that this product is going anywhere,” said Aaron Lehmann, president of the Iowa Farmers Union.
Despite the heavy campaigning by the Modern Ag Alliance, the bill is wildly unpopular among farmers, Lehmann said. Members of the union brought up the pesticide bill as a “special order of business” during their 2024 convention, when they decided on their policy stances for the upcoming year.
“I haven’t talked to a single citizen, farmer, employees for Bayer, anybody that thinks that this bill makes sense. No one is actually concerned that Roundup is going to stop being produced if they keep getting sued,” said Tommy Hexter, policy director for the Iowa Farmers Union.
Farmers rely on safe and effective herbicides, said Hexter. “We aren’t going to have a farm system tomorrow where there are no pesticides being used. But the issue with this bill is that it negates any corporate desire to innovate safer and more effective herbicides,” he said.
Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancers in the country. The 2025 report by the Iowa Cancer Registry predicted that 21,200 Iowans will be diagnosed with cancer this year alone.
The state’s cancer crisis has been a recurring theme in the debate surrounding the bill, with protestors nicknaming Bill 394 the “cancer gag act.”
“We all know we have a cancer plague in the state, but we’re supposed to be fixing it, not advocating for it,” said Democratic state Sen. Janice Weiner. “We don’t work for Bayer. We work for working Iowans, farming Iowans, Iowa families, all Iowans, and we do not take away their right to a measure of justice.”
Similar bills granting limited liability to pesticide producers have been heard in state legislatures across the country, including Idaho, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming.
A bill protecting pesticide companies from failure-to-warn lawsuits passed in both Georgia’s Senate and House just days before a Georgia jury awarded $2.1 million to a man who sued Bayer for cancer caused by Roundup weedkiller. The bill now awaits signing by Governor Brian Kemp.
“We’re very vigilant,” said Lehmann of the Iowa House’s decision not to hear the bill. Lobbyists can still attempt to reintroduce the bill through a different senate subcommittee. “Legislation can be tacked on to other legislation,” said Lehmann. “We know that this effort probably won’t end.”
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Anika Jane Beamer
Reporter, Iowa
Anika Jane Beamer covers the environment and climate change in Iowa, with a particular focus on water, soil and CAFOs. A lifelong Midwesterner, she writes about changing ecosystems from one of the most transformed landscapes on the continent. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Grinnell College. She is a former Outrider Fellow at Inside Climate News and was named a Taylor-Blakeslee Graduate Fellow by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
